April’s Drones

Two albums of drones from April Larson

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The title track of April Larson’s [*It Was Misplaced*](https://aprillarson.bandcamp.com/album/it-was-misplaced-2) is an echo chamber of strings, layer upon layer of strings, half representing stasis, the other half momentum, and between them finding an uneasy truce. “Sorry, You Know About the Pain” seems built, as well, from strings, but they’re muffled, as if heard from the floor above, with the exception of one tiny screech, as if a single string on a single bow is getting through the obstruction — the result shows a level of pixel-perfect detail that drone music rarely achieves let alone aspires to. The whole album explores drones, from the choral-like “The Shape of Wings in One of Many Worlds” and “A Quiet Life in a War Zone” to the hush of “Black Arctic,” its out-of-focus drama like a Richter painting.

*It Was Misplaced* was released back in 2013, but I only just heard it this week after falling for her brand new album, [*Up Below*](https://polarseasrecordings.bandcamp.com/album/up-below) on the Polar Seas label. These are more drones, denser and less specific in their constituent parts. Listen as a beading rumble infuses “Floating,” or a thrilling wind surfaces in “The Excavation.” Gorgeous stuff.

*It Was Misplaced* originally posted at [aprillarson.bandcamp.com](https://aprillarson.bandcamp.com/album/it-was-misplaced-2), *Up Below* at [polarseasrecordings.bandcamp](https://polarseasrecordings.bandcamp.com/album/up-below). More from Larson at [soundcloud.com/april-larson](https://soundcloud.com/april-larson).

This Week in Sound: Plasma Waves + Cymatic Art +

+ listening posts + womb tunes +

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

A lightly annotated clipping service.

**Ring Cycle:** The second season of *The Expanse*, the Syfy channel’s excellent (stellar?) adaptation of the James S. A. Corey novels, may have come to a close last month, but NASA is here to fill the void. Not only has the Cassini spacecraft situated itself between Saturn and its rings, it [has captured audio data of the particulates therein](http://gizmodo.com/this-is-our-first-sound-from-the-creepy-void-inside-sat-1794837316). As Rae Paoletta reports at [gizmodo.com](http://gizmodo.com/this-is-our-first-sound-from-the-creepy-void-inside-sat-1794837316), the Radio and Plasma Wave Science (RPWS) instrument on Cassini (see recording above) picked up “the hits of hundreds of ring particles per second,” something of an apparent surprise to scientists back home on Earth.

**Synaesthesia Loop:** Over at [nautil.us](http://nautil.us/blog/-this-is-what-musical-notes-actually-look-like), Heather Sparks summarizes the cymatic art of Jeff Louviere and Vanessa Brown. They took pictures of what different notes look like (see above) when stimulating “ink-black water,” and then turned those images back into sound, using the software Photosounder.

**Audiophile Update:** The whole notion of what “home audio” means is experiencing a continuing shift of late, as listening becomes — for better and worse — as much a subject for gadgets as producing sound: Google Home, it’s listening-enabled tech hub, now supports multiple users, by [recognizing their independent voices](http://www.infoworld.com/article/3193271/android/google-home-can-now-recognize-voices-what-does-that-mean-for-privacy.html); Amazon, in a race with Google Home, [has made its AI available to chatbot developers](https://www.macrumors.com/2017/04/20/amazon-alexa-software-chat-bot-developers/); and in case neither of those instances raise privacy concerns for you, [a lawsuit alleges that Bose wireless headphones spy on their users](https://www.macrumors.com/2017/04/20/bose-headphones-spy-listeners-lawsuit-alleges/).

**Womb Tune:** An artificial womb, currently being tested on lamb fetuses, is being considered for gestating humans. As Jessica Hamzelou writes at [newscientist.com](https://www.newscientist.com/article/2128851-artificial-womb-helps-premature-lamb-fetuses-grow-for-4-weeks/), the parent-oriented item would allow “parents to communicate sounds to the baby and to see it with a camera.””

**Sound Material:** The miracle substance graphene, the world’s reported strongest material, has numerous gee-whiz applications, ranging from desalinating sea water to cleaning up radioactive waste. It also has sonic potential, according to a paper (at [nature.com](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-01467-z/)) by M. S. Heath & D. W. Horsell. Check it out for details on thermoacoustics.

**Noise Central:** Three of the noisiest cities on the planet are in one country, India, according to a report in [indiatimes.com](http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/nagpur/india-is-noise-capital-of-the-world-expert/articleshow/58387208.cms). This coincided with the attempts to institute an annual “No-Horn Day” ([thehindu.com](http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/tp-kerala/call-to-turn-city-no-horn-zone/article18236983.ece)).

*This first appeared, in slightly different form, in the May 2, 2017, edition of the free Disquiet “This Week in Sound”email newsletter: [tinyletter.com/disquiet](http://tinyletter.com/disquiet).*

What Sound Looks Like

An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

This photograph was shot in New York after I landed at JFK a few weeks ago for a short visit from San Francisco. We touched down late, later even than planned, and so my memory is a little foggy. I’ve pieced together the first stages of the itinerary from the timeline that is automated Google photos backup (a fairly dependable course of action in such circumstances). The timeline exception is when photos are added from other services, like those edited in Instagram or another app, or transferred over from SMS or email — and those would only appear reverse-anachronistically later in the timeline, anyhow, not earlier. In any case, I’m fairly certain that this was shot not on the intra-JFK train that shuttles you from your arrival terminal to where you gather your bags and head out into the world (maybe such a thing doesn’t even exist — like I said, I was pooped), but on one of the city’s subway trains. This shot is a closeup of a well-worn sticker fixed next to an older, larger, metal speaker/button combo labeled only in all-caps English: “Emergency Intercom,” with the additional instructions “To Talk / Press and Release Button / Wait for Steady Light.” (That last bit suggests itself for poetic treatment.) This instructional infographic — instructographic? — does a good job of connecting speaking to pushing, thanks to the red color coding, though I must note that in real life the red button is a far darker shade. The little bright green light does its assigned job of reaffirming the text, which is to say it’s just as confusing, especially in, you know, an emergency. What seems to be missing from the image is any sense of, well, emergency. The demeanor of the cartoon human seems to be that of someone serenading a favorite device (Her: The Musical, now on Broadway), not alerting authorities to the existence of a suspicious package. Also worth mentioning: the red, waveformy, RSS-logo-ish speaking pattern seems to treat the microphone (below) and speaker (above) as equals.

An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.

A Modular Bloom

A piece by Lightbath

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

This elegant, gestural piece for modular synthesizer cycles a bit of low-key, atmospheric glitch several times in a row before a joyous little rupture occurs. When that happens, just prior to three minutes into this nearly four-minute piece, the whole sense of time shifts. What had felt slow and relaxed takes on a more sublime bearing. Once you know what’s hidden beneath the surface, it’s impossible to not sense its presence on repeat listens. What had been calm and collected now feels anticipatory, like a stop-motion image of a flower that quite suddenly, in strong daylight, blooms.

There’s also a lovely, misty video for it on YouTube:

Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/lightbath](https://soundcloud.com/lightbath/a-window-into-another). More from Lightbath, aka Bryan Noll, at [lightbath.com](https://lightbath.com/).

The Organ as Installation

Olivia Block at the Rockefeller Memorial Chapel

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The opening roar of this excerpt of a recording suggests a crowd going wild, not so much at a concert as at a vuvuzela-filled soccer stadium. In this case, the stadium is a stately gothic structure, Rockefeller Memorial Chapel on the campus of the University of Chicago, and the ecstatic noise is coming from its E.M. Skinner pipe organ, in an original piece of music by Olivia Block. Advance notice of the performance, which was recorded live on April 21, 2017, described it as something that “straddles the line between musical composition and sound installation.” The installation aspect is in part related to how Block’s use of the organ explores the contours of the space, and also how speakers distributed throughout the building suggest that attendees wander amid the sound to hear it from different vantages. The work, as reproduced in this stereo document, moves from recognizable organ tones to fantasms of eager, treble-piercing waves. Live performances are difficult to reproduce, spatially informed ones all the more so. This recording, by Alex Inglesian, gives us a sense of the work’s breadth and impact.

Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/olivia-block](https://soundcloud.com/olivia-block/132-ranks-concert-excerpt). More from Block, who is from Texas and lives in Chicago, at [twitter.com/oliviablock](https://twitter.com/oliviablock) and [oliviablock.net](http://oliviablock.net), and on the piece at [renaissancesociety.org](http://renaissancesociety.org/events/1170/132-ranks/).